In Reverse: Revisiting Processes Whilst Looking Forward with Mumdance

Yesterday, Mumdance (aka Jack Adams) emailed in to ask if he could do something a little bit different this Friday night. Asking if he could bring some of his hardware in with him to modify his back to back DJ set with Logos - the artist with whom he has a collaboration, ‘In Reverse’, on the Keysound This Is How We Roll compilation - we felt compelled for him to explain himself further. So we started probing him and asked him exactly what he meant and out of our conversation blossomed this spontaneous interview that kinda covers the extent of what he’s proposing and his methodology behind making it happen. You'll be playing live during a back to back set this Friday. What does that mean exactly? Yeah, so I’m going to be doing a kind of preview of my new live show. As I’m going back to back with Logos we are going to both DJ for a bit, b2b, then when I have got my ear in, we are going to switch up the dynamic, still back to back, but it’ll be him playing tunes and then me building tracks live and overlaying sounds onto the tracks he plays. Can you run us through how it all works etc? I guess more and more as I listen to music, it strikes me that the best dance tracks are the simplest ones, you don’t need a thousand sounds going off, you just need a few really strong sounds, good ideas and rhythm. Equally I feel at the moment that everyone is coming through with hugh gimmicks, big light shows, fireworks, zorbs, swear I even saw someone on a fucking trampoline the other day... the focus on the music and dancing seems to be lost as people are watching a spectacle. Then the other side of this is you have the massive electronic acts doing "live" shows where they bring a ton of gear on stage and it all looks very important, but all they seem to be doing to my ears is just tweaking filters and bringing pre-recorded parts in and out. It just seems like a bit of a sham and a waste of time. So my show is a reaction to this. I’ve stripped it down to the bare minimum; a 909 drum machine, a hardware sampler, two decks and a mixer. I have loaded my sampler with a ton of one shot sounds from right across the spectrum of music, from sampling my favourite records and my synths, to field recordings that I have made with a portable recorder on my various travels. I’m going to build tracks live and on the fly. Fully improvised. No planning; just feeling my way through it and reacting to how the crowd likes it. I’m not making massively complex and intricate tracks, I’m making raw, stripped down club music to make people dance. But the key thing is that I am actually making them 100% live, I literally have the drum sounds that the 909 makes and a load of 1 shot sounds in the sampler and I play all the melodies and rhythms and build the track live in front of you, I have no idea how it’s going to turn out each time (and there is a lot of scope for it to go wrong!) It’s all hardware; no computer screens. It bores the shit out of me watching people on their computers. In terms of how it sounds, I guess it sits somewhere between Jeff Mills Drum Jams and golden era 8 Bar Grime, with a load of weird found sounds and field recordings keeping things interesting. I still absolutely love DJing so wanted the show to incorporate it, when I take the show on tour I'll play a few tunes, then move onto a live jam for a bit, then maybe mix in an acapella and build around that, I guess it’s kind of a hybrid show. The focus is definitely on keeping people dancing and enjoying themselves. Have you played out like this before? Nope, this is the first time, I was gonna just do it as a "soft launch" and not tell anyone so I could just work out what works and what doesn’t, but I guess the cat has been let out the bag now. It’s always good to drop yourself in at the deep end though, nothing like the fear of making a right twat out of yourself in front of a crowd of people motivate you to work! It seems like you're a brave boy, always trying new things. Like your track on ...How We Roll, 'In Reverse' is exactly what the title suggests, every sound plays in reverse, right? What made you and Logos want to approach the track in this manner? Were there any strenuous difficulties in producing this way? Logos and I were in the studio and we had a day with not too much productivity, nothing seemed to be working and then after tearing our hair out for a bit, one of us said... "let’s just try again but do it all backwards" so we did and it came together in about 2 hours! It wasn’t too hard to put together, about a year and a half ago I ditched the computer and went 100% out the box. I use all hardware synths/samplers/effects and an old MPC60 to sequence. All I use the computer for now is as a multi-track recorder and it’s really changed my workflow and mindset. You learn to recognise when something is done and also recording stuff to audio stops you from being able to go back and tweak it all the time like you can with midi. So anyway, we just fed a load of stuff in the MPC, reversed it, fired up a couple of synths and just jammed it out. Then I recorded my voice for the back masked message in the breakdown & it was pretty much done What else is coming up for you? I’ve literally just finished a mixtape album, 13 tracks over 50 minutes. It’s called Twists & Turns and it should be dropping next week, maybe.... it’s my first output in like two years, since the first Different Circles Mixtape album and I’m really happy with the way it’s turned out. It feels like a body of work rather than a number of fragmented tracks. It’s a lot darker than my previous output but still has a huge variety of styles and sounds. It also features a load of collaborations I’ve done with Logos and one with these guys, Mao. There’s also a few shoegaze tracks I’ve been writing of late, one of which I sang on.... I'm just trying to develop myself as a producer and this mixtape is a pretty much a direct product of that. Apart from the mixtape, Ive got tracks and EPs coming out soon on Tectonic, Keysound and Unknown to the Unknown. Then as soon as this mixtape drops I’m going to take this new live show on the road! Catch Mumdance going back to back and kind of playing live, in Room Three this Friday.